As a big fan of "Spirited Away" and "Howl's Moving Castle", I had high hopes for this movie. While beautiful, the length and minimal story line left me wishing I had waited until it came out for rental.

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I was really disappointed with the film not because I expected a more magical Miyazaki but because his storytelling prowess is lost here. Though every single shot is so beautifully designed it's plagued by repetition and overly long sequences. It covers plenty of historical ground in 172 minutes but not much
emotional ground. Besides his narrative being problematic, the whole ideology is immoral. The film explicitly makes a case for beauty and design being more important than preventing war and being with your wife in her dying days. Beauty is in fact, very ugly when it is used for destructive purposes, but the film doesn't do much to make this statement. And the man behind the design isn't very interesting. He lacks personality, and even his imaginative and inspired dreams become repetitive and don't inform much. Miyazaki doesn't make a very good case for the genius of this man. I applaud Miyazaki for not being pigeonholed into making the same movie again and again, and he proves to be adventurous even to the end. But the beauty of the rendered images cannot overshadow very obvious flaws.…Expand

I dunno... this was great to look at.... and since I like engineering and planes and history, it was okay... but after awhile, it just seems to be lacking enough story to justify all the sidetrips and lingering odd scenes. Kind of boring in the long run.... tho surely masterful in its animation style.

While Miyazaki’s two-hour-long, historical-melodrama swansong is destined to be his most divisive film yet, it is also his most adult and interesting, and never less than visually breathtaking throughout.

Does The Wind Rises represent Miyazaki at the top of his game? No, not really. But it could be Miyazaki at the end of the game, and that alone is reason enough to appreciate the film for the things it offers rather than hammer it too hard for the things it lacks.